13 Successful Entrepreneurs Share What They Wish They'd Known 5 Years Ago

Five years ago I was
re-doing my last year of high school, managing a retail store
full-time and performing in a play five nights a week. Suffice to
say I burned out pretty quickly and in hindsight I can see why.

Hindsight is a grand thing, but we don’t all go through the same
experiences, so the hindsight of others can be beneficial to us
as well. These 13 successful entrepreneurs and startupers have
some great stories to tell, and I thought asking what they wish
they knew five years ago would be a great way to find out what
advice they have that could benefit us now.

“It's a marathon, not a sprint.” — Soraya
Darabi

I wish I knew five years ago what people have been telling
me for decades: life, and most everything, is a marathon, not a
race.

Five years ago we made a bet on the term “content
marketing,” which is what Copyblogger had been talking about all
along without the terminology. That turned out to be a good bet,
but I wish I had known how much the industry would explode. Maybe
I would have done things differently, maybe not, but being
absolutely sure that a billion-dollar industry was being born
would have certainly made the bad days easier to get
through.

Most of us are stuck thinking innovation is gathering creative
geniuses in a room and brainstorming what life will be like in
10 years. You might come up with something impressive, but
you’re going to build something no one has any use for.

I wish someone had told me five years ago how simple innovation
can be: study a task someone has, break it out into its
individual steps, eliminate as many steps as possible.

OXO innovates on household items we take for granted like
measuring cups. As they watched real people fill up a
traditional measuring cup, they saw one of the steps we have is
this awkward bending over to see how much liquid was actually
in the cup. We’ll do this four or five times trying to get an
accurate amount. Innovation was eliminating the awkward bend.
They added the measuring cup’s ruler at an angle so you can
read from the top. Simple, but only discovered because they
spent the time intently watching the steps people took to get a
task done and removed one. They sold a couple million of those
measuring cups in the first 18 months.

I wish I had known that even the best team with the best
product will fail if the target market is not big enough to
support pervasive adoption. And after you think big, I’ve
learned you have to think small — a company must choose one or
two concrete problems to solve and then solve them brilliantly,
because a business will never be successful if it tries to be
all things to all people.

“Building a billion-dollar business starts with a
decision.” — Dan Martell

I wish I knew that the only different between building a $500K
dollar business vs. $10M is deciding. It’s that simple. It
doesn’t require more time, more intelligence or more know how.
It only requires that you decided up front to set that goal,
and every decision you made was aligned with that goal Can it
be that simple? Trust me, it is.

Five years ago, I wish I knew how quickly our preferred
communication mode would shift from the written word, to photos
and videos. Today, if you’re in social media and/or content
marketing, a working knowledge of photo and video composition
and editing is almost a requirement.

One thing I wish I knew when I got started with blogging and
building my online presence was that down the road, I would
want everything to be branded under my name as opposed to a
nickname. Even now, I have to introduce myself twice — once as
Kristi Hines, and then when I get the blank stare, again as
Kikolani. It’s getting better now that I’m doing a lot of
freelance writing under my real name, but there are still times
that people only recognize me by my blog name.

I’ve being blogging and writing since I started in my first
business WooThemes. But one of my biggest mistakes was not
building a mailing list from the start. It was something that I
thought ‘Internet marketers’ did but I didn’t seize the
opportunity to speak directly with my readers in my blog. For
anyone starting out as a writer, my advice would be to knock up
a simple sign up form and start building your mailing list now.

Five years ago, I wished I’d known more about software and
product development. Specifically these two: 1) that big
software projects have to be built in small, iterative,
testable chunks and 2) that it’s much easier to build a brand
and be known for simple solution that solves one problem than a
complex solution that solves many.

“One thing I wish I knew five years ago (that I learned the
hard way!) was just how hard it is to find the intersection
between the right product and the right market — what we now
call product/market fit. It’s a Herculean task to get there,
most don’t make it, and there’s no obvious road.

Having said that, if I can add in one more thing I wish I knew
back then, was that there is a process (Lean Startup) that you
can use; a framework for de-risking your startup and searching
for the right path. That would have been very helpful five
years ago!”

A year in the world of startups can feel like five years in a
larger company, and every year I seem to learn more and more.
One thing I have learned over the last five years that has
really stood out in my mind, though, is how important it is to
be patient.

You hear these stories of people making $5k in revenue in the
first month, or companies that have 100,000 users right off the
bat, and so expectations of what is reasonable start to get
somewhat distorted. The reality is that many successful
businesses are built step by step, and that even the ones who
do achieve crazy results have often had a long buildup (through
their audience, founders, etc.).

I recently read an article that quoted Jeff Bezos, in which he
said it takes seven years to build a real business. For me, I
have had to learn to focus on the long term and not get
disappointed when you don’t see the crazy growth numbers often
cited in startup success stories. It can take a lot of time for
people to notice real value, but if you focus on your customers
and building products people love, then you are on a path that
— given enough time — will pan out.